Probabilistic calculation of execution intervals for workflows

The comprehensive treatment of time and time constraints is crucial in designing and managing business processes. Process managers need tools that help them predict execution durations, anticipate time problems, pro-actively avoid time constraint violations, and make decisions about the relative process priorities and timing constraints when significant or unexpected delays occur. Variations of activity durations and branching decisions at run-time make it necessary that we treat time management in workflows in a probabilistic way. Therefore we introduce the notion of probabilistic time management and discuss the application of this new concept for workflow design as well as time aware, predictive and proactive workflow execution management.